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What should I do next?

Working as an SDE2 right now. Got promoted recently. Motivation to work is at an all-time low. Feels like I am stuck in a rat race. Is this normal? I see senior engineers in my team and frankly, I don't want to end up like them in the next few years. Immense respect for their skills and what they bring to the table, but I don't see myself doing that. I have a few options to consider: Bucket 1 Keep grinding at my current role Decent growth (career and money) Stable life, certainity Low Risk, Moderate Reward Bucket 2 Coast at current role Look for a switch (preferably outside India) Make a lot of money Basically, follow this and keep climbing the ladder Boring AF Bucket 1 and Bucket 2 can probably be merged, keeping them separate as it is very different in reality. Bucket 3 (The Interesting Bucket) Coast at current role Build micro-SaaS solutions, contribute to open source, build problem solving attitude Startup someday Could result in slow growth, might end up wasting a few years. The real constraint? I have to support a family. All expenses. We have no other income source at this point. Taking any risk with income is a big deal for me. Just ranting here. I am not expecting a clear pick. Just looking for more opinions on what I am thinking, and maybe understand if I am overthinking.

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Sherlock007

TCS

7 months ago

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SteveRogers

Stealth

7 months ago

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BearBear

Stealth

7 months ago

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BearBear

Stealth

7 months ago

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ForkedRiser

Cognizant

7 months ago

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pointynips

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7 months ago

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Indian Startups on

by Apes

Stealth

Insanity check on leaving 2Cr at 26

I have a remote job with 250k USD/2CR base salary and get to travel for free internationally 6 times a year to beautiful places in Europe. My manager is a saint and I don’t think I will ever find someone as good as him. I am considering leaving this job to startup. I would love to hear everyone’s unfiltered thoughts on this please 🙏🏼 Firstly, this is not a fake post - Luckily I have been one of the few people who were early in AI to train very large LMs, so I have an edge and get paid crazy money for it. Why am I leaving? Over the last one month I had time off from work to build a new AI capability for coding assistants. It’s a technological breakthrough and my AI is 10X cheaper and has 100% codebase coverage for automatic feature development, bug fixing and automating 3rd party integrations into your very large codebases. Others are working on it as well, but I have achieved higher results on public coding assistants benchmarks(SWE-bench). I believe in this breakthrough and technology, and this is the absolute right time to build it, not 6 months ago, not 6 months later - too early and too late. This could potentially be my next moonshot or I could also fail, but learn a lot in the process and not have regrets 5 years down the line in not pursuing a breakthrough in AI that someone down the line is going to monopolise. My financial situation is good and bad - I have NW of 3.2 Cr, but they are tied in 2 real estate properties - I am aware that this is stupid to not have anything liquid. I have a running home loan of 1Cr to the bank and 30 lakhs to be paid to my Dad, these two are my biggest mental blockers. My wife(married early this year) earns really well as well and I have some ~20L liquid, so day to day runway is of easily 1 year. Finally, I don’t believe that it I leave my current job, I will ever get another international offer that pays this well in cash and has remote work given how to market has changed recently. I am trying to disassociate from a greed mindset and looking into a potentially very high exponential growth/learnings. Please provide your suggestions frens, I am planning to speaking to my manager on Monday 🌻🌻

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Indian Startups on

by AllRounderSde

Student

Confused in life ...

Hello people, I graduated last year and joined a fast-paced startup back in july as an SDE (2023 grad). So many things have changed so far within the company. Company has closed good series B funding. The top level management has changed, my manager and colleagues resigned due to the kind of work and cultural shift and lots of work but I stood there and delivered projects (was making them from scratch). Whatever was thrown on me during this time, I took that as an opportunity and delivered that. I literally worked on 4-5 tech stacks and built complex projects from scratch with 3 members team only. Now it seems like their ask is never ending and they again want me to put in another techstack since the existing products we built are working fine and we are just maintaining it now. The culture of the company is still very good despite having lots of work though the pay is above average. I am seeing my friends around me joining another company and getting much better hikes. I also want to make a switch but deep down in my heart I have these questions coming up: 1. Should I switch before completing 2 years since it's my first job and I have spent only 1 year so far here. I really don't want to make this habit of switching again and again. 2. The kind of bonding I have made with my colleagues so far. Will I be able to get the same environment in the new company? 3. Should I join the startup again or should I target MNCs now. Because I have been building multiple complex projects for the past 1.7 years (this is my 3rd startup) from scratch and this is also getting normalized for me. Is it time to work on a scale? 4. Feel less valued sometimes. Despite delivering lots of efforts, it seems like I am not getting valued much because it's kinda hardware company and things go around that only. 5. Although, I am working on complex projects here but sometimes I feel missing out if I hear what others are doing. Should I go to a pure software based company? 6. I am not making much here to be honest despite having much better coding skills (10 base + 2.5 PB + 2.5 VP) but I am able to manage my money well despite living in Bangalore. Should I be hungry for more? I would be happy to read your opinion on these guys.

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Software Engineers on

by Someone_on_earth

Startup

Pls Help me in getting clarity about my career/life

- I recently given my final year exams of B.tech (cse) in June 2024. - Currently working remotely as fullstack engineer intern from last 4 months (25k stipend p.m), will get final decision about PPO in August. - after working I don't really like the culture of the company and I am also not seeing any growth in this company, so I have made my mind to not work at here any more. - at the same time I am feeling that I have lost my interest in programming , I don't know why but the idea of growing as a software developer in career i.e sde1->sde2....tech lead -> CTO is not exciting to me right now. - I come from very humble background, I am the first graduate in my family, I have done B.Tech by taking education loan of (4.95lakh), I have no senior whom I can talk to about my situation and who can genuinely guide me . - my family financial condition is very poor, I have 2 siblings who need money for their education as well, I need money to eliminate the daily unnecessary financial worries/disputes in my family. - I enrolled into Btech in 2020 by seeing all the high packages people are getting right after college , so I thought the career prospects are good after doing Btech in cse , apart from this I always had this thought of doing my own venture sometime in future and I thought business knowledge can be gained easily than the techincal knowledge so let's first gain the hard to acquire knowledge i.e technical (programming) because in today's age every business is a tech first business. - I had initial plan of getting a high paying job (1lakh/month) ,improve my family financial situation, save money in order to invest in my ventures and create secondary sources of income and then leave my job - but now I have realised that I had started out with a wrong goal in the first place ,(my assumption was that once I get a high paying job as sde I will only work for 9-5 and rest of the time will be spend on side hustles(investing,real estate,ventures etc)) - this is not the reality in my current understanding, as due to competition I need to spend all my time and energy on one thing in order to get success. - the idea of spending all my time and energy to become a good sde looks limiting to me as in future it will only open doors to sde roles and I will not get roles where I can contribute to the business side (which I am interested in) - my loan repayment will start from from next year June. - I want roles where I can contribute directly to the business side of company, roles that give me the real insights about the market (i.e business analyst, data analyst, consultant, P.M etc) - when I think of leaving what I am currently doing and prepare for such roles I got horrified by the idea of starting from scratch , and not getting the new job role timely before my loan repayment starts . What should I do pls guide me as a mentor/big brother 🙏🏻 . . . .